What is Setai? A kind of satay? A kind of settee? Actually, it’s a hotel brand whose lavish, sleekly bland properties are perhaps a dastardly plot to make the Mandarin Oriental look quirky. Now a Setai has landed incongruously on a scrappy stretch of Fifth Avenue, in a new sixty-story tower by Gwathmey Siegel that is divided between expensive condos (reported to be selling slowly) and expensive hotel rooms. The task of providing a concomitantly expensive restaurant has fallen to Michael White, an Italian-trained chef whose cooking at Marea, Alto, Convivio, and Osteria Morini has made him a star.

Ai Fiori (“among the flowers”) is said to be loosely inspired by the Ligurian coast, which gives White license to pick and choose from Italian and French culinary traditions. The result is a kind of analog to the Setai’s ethos of contextless luxury. This is a restaurant that has everything—more or less faultless cooking, imaginative plating, exemplary service—except character. A main course of butter-poached lobster, atop a fondant of spring vegetables, is magnificent, firm yet delicate, but it’s a dish you can imagine seeing at any number of high-end places. Still, there are many inventive touches. A slow-poached egg appetizer is a miasma of mildly astringent foam from which little umami kicks emerge in the form of lobster knuckles and veal sweetbreads. Crisp-skinned squab breast, in a dark reduction, seems familiar enough, but nothing prepares you for the tenderness of the squab-leg confit that accompanies it. Lamb en crépinette (wrapped in caul fat with savory leaf) is an innovation too far—dangerously rich and, with its herby, sausagey taste, a little like Thanksgiving stuffing. White, a pasta virtuoso, puts an Italian-style primi course between starters and mains, and portions are generally small enough to reward the detour: a dish of gnocchetti stridently flavored with seafood and saffron is essentially bouillabaisse transmuted into pasta.

The restaurant is up a spiral staircase just inside the Setai’s entrance. Windows of fritted glass suggest that the establishment wants as little as possible to do with the neighborhood’s garmentos and electronics shops, and sparse attendance at lunch suggests that the neighborhood returns the compliment. Evenings are when the place fills up, with what is pretty clearly an expense-account crowd. (With minestrone soup at twenty-three dollars, they’d better be.) On the way out of the hotel, one of the many black-clad men with Secret Service-style earpieces attempts to turn the revolving door for you. It’s a bizarrely inefficient piece of politesse that leads to a comic tangle of arms and thank-yous and excuse-mes as you head out into the night. (Open daily for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Entrées $21-$49.) ♦